Thinking and tweeting

January 16, 2013 - 2:00 AM

It used to be that students who may have exchanged angry words over the course of the school day would have at least 12 hours to cool off before another exchange. That time helped prevent people from acting on impulse and from doing things they may have later regretted.

Today's technology, however, has effectively reduced the cooling off period to zero, and when instantaneous communication runs up against a desire for instant gratification, the results can be as tragic as they are predictable.

Last week, a teenager from Mashpee was arrested after he allegedly sent a message via Twitter to a teenager in Rockland that said he was "going to shoot up everyone." Police noted that there was no indication that the young man planned to follow through with his comment, but that matters little in today's combustible environment, especially when it comes to school safety.

What the teenager was thinking when he sent the message remains unknown, and it matters very little. What matters is what law enforcement officials must do when such a threat is made: they need to respond in a way that helps ensure the safety of everyone involved. Thus, this young man may face charges of making a threat causing school disruption, threatening to commit a crime, and disturbing a school assembly. If prosecuted as an adult to the full extent of the law, this young man could face up to three years in a state prison.

In some ways, this case is only slightly different from one late last year involving two women, one of whom had taken a photograph of the other making an obscene gesture and pretending to shout at a sign requesting silence at Arlington National Cemetery. Whether or not the women meant any real harm or disrespect by their actions quickly became immaterial in the ensuing firestorm of anger; a storm which cost both of them their jobs.

People saying or doing something stupid is hardly a new phenomenon. But while our capacity for inane behavior may have always existed, the scope of potential consequences is something altogether new. What we do can be recorded and shared with millions of people in a matter of seconds.

Sometimes we have no control over this: a friend or a loved one believes he or she is capturing a humorous memory and decides to post it somewhere online. But more often than not, we have the option of controlling either ourselves or the distribution. Unfortunately, what we have in terms of ability, we sometimes lack in self control or understanding. We erroneously think that our communications are private, limited to just ourselves and one other person, or a small circle of friends.

It would be easy to dismiss this young man's action as the behavior of a careless adolescent, but as the millions of tweets, postings, and video uploads will attest, stupidity is hardly limited to the teenage years. We need as a society to acknowledge that there has been a fundamental shift in the way we communicate, and that we need to take responsibility for that new reality. Further, we need to teach young people, as well as ourselves, that just because we can do something does not necessarily mean that we should.